Where to start, where to start?
It’s been a while. Last journal was actually pumped out back in November. That was before Nadine was back from Jordan and before more stuff got so fucked up. Fucked up does not equal bad things. Fucked up can mean the end of one thing and the beginning of another. It’s been five months since I’ve been able to speak my mind out here on Radio Reality City, so let’s take it from the top.
Further Radio Reality City canon is being refined, so the two of you who are actually sticking around for the short stories and the lore can rest assured that there is more in development every day. Honestly, it’s only getting cooler by the second, but unfortunately the day where I can share it is a far ways off.
Tonight I’m being reminded that Olympia was a long time ago, and my creative bursts since then have changed their manifestation.
If you’ve ever perused my archives here at RRC, you’ll notice that I commonly say I write to remember. Well, I write to preserve. I write to preserve times and places. Things I couldn’t get a picture of, that’s how this all started. Stories of ideas that I never thought I’d be able to look at with my own two eyes. But it’s being built up now with an upward spiral of technical knowledge around cameras and how they work.
Since I’m getting better at photography, I’ve barely written a poem in five months. My general way of expressing myself hasn’t changed, but I am devoting much less time to sitting with my notepad. While that is a rather sad thing to think about, the one avenue of creativity pretty much all but shutting off, I feel as though I have a certain amount of mastery that makes me happy.
In December I was a featured poet in Tacoma, at Honey at Alma Mater. Familiar faces were there, Nadine was there. She was featured, too, and so begins the surreality of other creative options I can now set my sights on.
Since you last saw me I was just getting into drones, but that’s been put on the backburner to focus solely on photography. I’ve got another couple of shoots under my belt, and more lenses than I really know what to do with. I now have a Sony 50mm f/1.8 for the sake of simplicity. The Helios is gorgeous but it’s difficult to work with in practical situations.
So let’s talk gear, then. One of my recent gets was the Fotodiox PRONTO autofocusing adapter. It’s a motorized adapter for manual SLR lenses, natively a Leica M-mount to Sony E. It is also arguably a direct clone of the Techart Pro adapter, that was patented first and sold first. I would have gotten the Techart if it was $129 less expensive, to be more in competition with the Fotodiox. People are review-bombing the PRONTO and slagging it off for existing, but whatever. It does exactly what I wanted it to for less money, in a solid brass and aluminum construction. So with the PRONTO, an M42 to M-mount adapter, and my Helios 44-2, I now have autofocused Helios shots. Which is fucking insanity. I thought it was possible, but was actually surprised when I found out I could make it happen, so I did.
I can’t use my Helios 40-2 (although that is the eventual goal here) because it’s too heavy for the motors on the PRONTO, so I have to hold the Helios and loosely grip my camera to make it work. I’ve gotten in contact with the Smallrig people (they make my camera cage and a bunch of professional cinema level cages equipment) to see if they have a lens support and rail system to support a moving lens. I have yet to find a solution.
Also had to dremmel off the front couple of millimeters around the front of my cage to get the PRONTO to work, so now I’m rocking that Metro: Exodus look on my camera. Works well with my Jupiter-11.
Oh yeah, I have a slick Jupiter-11 135mm f/4 now, also in M42 mount. I can’t get enough of these KMZ lenses.
For the ‘radio’ part of Radio Reality City, my recent photography interests have been found in infrared light. I have been struck with inspiration by Richard Mosse’s ‘The Enclave’, where he and a crew of guys took rolls of Aerochrome 1443 film out to the Congo and filmed the civil war happening there. Aerochrome is responsible for wicked pink foliage and super blue hues in infrared light, and I’ve found a company that recently released a filter that’ll make Aerochrome happen in digital cameras. Trick is, you have to have a full spectrum camera, that is: a camera that can see from 300nm to 1200nm, from the tip of ultraviolet light all the way through near-infrared light.
Naturally, I have already signed myself up to open up the Sony A6300 of mine to full spectrum. I have to send it in to get it worked on here within the week. Then after that will come some appropriate filters for use in infrared photography. I’m psyched. Kolari Vision are the opticians who are going to work on my camera, and I highly recommend you give them a looking at if you’re interested in things UV and IR.
A close friend of mine has independently discovered the wonders of ultraviolet strobes in studio photography, so there might be something cool happening there. We shall see!
That’s all for photography stuff. On the backend I’ve been chipping away at updates for the site and uploading my creative works to the cloud so I have them everywhere.
It has been a demanding couple of months here, guys. I don’t know if anyone else saw the tweet a few weeks ago where 2019 feels like season four of 2016. I resonate with that to a degree. Things are just the same but brand new. Well, almost.
Moving out, new car, actual school, and other stuff set to happen this year.
If any of my readers find themselves in Seattle, you may have heard that the Art Institutes of Seattle shut down without much warning aside from an email this month. Students were notified about two weeks ago that they had a month to see if anyone was going to purchase the school. No one did. So they had to shut down early.
I was almost one of the 650 students scrambling to see. I was being called daily by admissions staff, wanting me to come to orientation in January and all that. When I backed out (because over 20 Art Institutes campuses closed last year alone, and because I was paying attention to my surroundings), I was told by my admissions handler that he’s only seen one or two people out of fifty come back the next year after withdrawing their application. Well. Look how that turned out.
It’s really a shame that there’s no longer anything to go back to. It’s even rumored that faculty and students looted the place. The company that owns the Art Institutes no longer cares about the non-profit nature of art schools, clearly. If you’re reading this and going to an Art Institutes campus, take a look around, okay? Make sure things are okay.
With that being said, try two at UWT has been sent out. This time before the deadline, and this time with a better thought out essay and major. Cybersecurity is going to be the name of the game for school for me. I think it’s fitting, and hey I do enjoy programming. I’d love to learn more.
I am beat, you guys. I haven’t done much writing like this in so long I can feel it weighing down on my getting out this journal.
I will say that I can’t wait to start posting Aerochrome Helios shots. And that I’m going to be going on a trip this summer, which will give me so much to think about and make out out of. 2019 is a slow burn. Little victories every month. Nothing massive quite yet, but that’s okay. I’m doing well so far.
Thank you guys for sticking around. If the site looks messed up right now, don’t worry about it. I’m trying to do more of a portfolio thing with this whole endeavor, but I really want to keep these more personal parts in. Are these things mutually exclusive? I don’t even know that yet.
Consume reality!
Radio Reality City!
Consume Reality! 